Economists and historians have identified the period between 1870 and 1914 as one marked by the movement of capital and labor across the globe at unprecedented speed. The accompanying spread of the gold standard and industrial techniques contained volatile and ambiguous implications for workers everywhere. Industrial engineers made new machinery and industrial techniques the measure of human effort. The plight of workers in South Africa's deep-level gold mines in the era following the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 provides a powerful example of just how lethal the new benchmarks of human effort could be. When by 1904 close to 50,000 Africans refused to return to the mines, mining policy began to coalesce around solving the “labor shortage” problem and dramatically reducing working costs. Engineers, especially American engineers, rapidly gained the confidence of the companies that had made large investments in the deep-level mines of the Far East Rand by bringing more than 60,000 indentured Chinese workers to the mines to make up for the postwar shortfall in unskilled labor in late 1904. But the dangerous working conditions that drove African workers away from many of the deep-level mines persisted. Three years later, in 1907, their persistence provoked a bitter strike by white drill-men.

Many historical studies, some of them comparative, have explored the foundations of welfare states and the birth of unemployment policies in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Nearly all have focused on political debate at national level. This paper bases its analysis on labour market reforms initiated in Strasbourg and Liverpool in the decades preceding World War I. It explores how bona fide unemployed workers, the proper clients of official help, were distinguished from the mass of the poor and indigent. The labour market had to be defined and organized before policies for the unemployed could be put in place. The object is to demonstrate not only how this was done, but also how different perceptions of social justice and economic efficiency influenced both the process and the outcomes of public interventions, in this instance undermining attempts to transfer specific policies from one country to another.

The prevailing image of twentieth-century English “youth” is as a triumphal signifier of affluent leisure consumption. By contrast, this article demonstrates the importance of young working-class people's economic role as wage-earners in the mid-twentieth century. This shaped their treatment by the family and the state and the life histories of the adults they became. Juveniles were crucial breadwinners in interwar working-class households. However, the consequences of high unemployment among adult males helped redefine youth as a period of state protection and leisure in the post-1945 decades. Nevertheless, personal affluence remained limited, and young people's economic responsibilities high, until at least the mid-1950s. The history of twentieth-century youth is best understood as one in which young working-class people's fortunes were closely linked to their family's circumstances and their importance as a supply of cheap labour. Social class thus formed, and was formed by, the experience and memory of being young.

Migration history has made some major leaps forward in the last fifteen years or so. An important contribution was Leslie Page Moch's Moving Europeans, published in 1992, in which she weaves the latest insights in migration history into the general social and economic history of western Europe. Using Charles Tilly's typology of migration patterns and his ideas on the process of proletarianization since the sixteenth century, Moch skilfully integrates the experience of human mobility in the history of urbanization, labour relations, (proto)industrialization, demography, family history, and gender relations. Her state-of-the-art overview has been very influential, not least because it fundamentally criticizes the modernization paradigm of Wilbur Zelinsky and others, who assumed that only in the nineteenth century, as a result of industrialization and urbanization, migration became a significant phenomenon. Instead, she convincingly argues that migration was a structural aspect of human life. Since then many new studies have proved her point and refined her model.

The history of migration is the history of human connections. Migration, then, is a powerful element in world history precisely because it identifies points of contact among peoples and nations and thus provides a deeper understanding of the human experience than institutional or diplomatic perspectives. Here, I seek to connect the global history of migration to family systems, demographic patterns and gender relations – those most intimate connections that bring life to our analyses of the past. A global perspective on historical migrations offers a fascinating challenge to the Europeanist, familiar with the rhythms of European migration and the social and economic systems that gave rise to them. In response to Adam McKeown's observations about Asia in world migrations, I focus on Chinese family and gender relations.

In May 1928 The Watling Resident, a local newspaper directed at a readership among the inhabitants of a working-class estate created by the London County Council on the north-western outskirts of the city, published its first issue. It took the opportunity to represent what it saw as its readers' urgent and existential difficulties: “We have been torn up by the roots and rudely transplanted to foreign soil.” According to the newspaper, these painful feelings of displacement were voiced “over and over again” by people living on the new estate. These migrants and their mouthpiece spoke and wrote in terms that prefigure the pioneering historical work of Oscar Handlin or suggest they were of one mind with the Chicago School of sociology. In this light it is remarkable that these migrants were not recent arrivals from Poland, or even from Ireland or Scotland; rather they had moved to the estate from inner London, and more than half had previously lived a few miles away in the north London boroughs of St Pancras, Islington, Finsbury, and Paddington.

Recent historiography attempts increasingly to move beyond Eurocentrism. In the field of migration, Adam McKeown's article is a fine example of an attempt to put global migration in a non-Eurocentric perspective. Perhaps its most acute insight is in putting the paradigmatic European migration flows to the Americas in the nineteenth century at par with the mainly intra Asian (south/south-east Asian and north-east Asian) migration flows. McKeown's main target of attack is the unabashed “Euro-centrism” (or rather the “North Atlantic centrism”) of much of the migration literature on the so called age of mass migration. Eurocentrism appears, at least in the way that McKeown presents it, as a set of three interrelated propositions.

The age of mass migration that commenced in the 1840s has traditionally been conceived within the orbit of Atlantic history, and rendered as a narrative of modernity and industrialization. At an individual level the departure for the New World was propelled by rising expectations, which nicely fitted the macro-pattern of converging labour markets between North-America – as well as Australia for that matter – and Europe. Many of the assumptions that brought global migration under the aegis of modernization have been refuted, or at least seriously questioned. But that still leaves us with the important question whether there are alternative paradigms available that fit the realities both within and outside the North Atlantic world. Some have already answered the question negatively. According to Hatton and Williamson, it is impossible to find a unifying paradigm that would enable us to develop a global migration history. Their argument is too important not to be cited:

Migration has been a central concern of many areas in the writing of European history, and even more so when dealing with the histories of the white settler colonies of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In contrast, migration overseas constitutes a mere footnote (if it is mentioned at all) in densely populated China and India, where the total number of those who migrated out of the country in the last couple of centuries was a relatively small percentage of those who did not. In his thought-provoking and far-reaching essay, Adam McKeown challenges us to look beyond the normative model of “global” migration that focuses solely on European migration. Through innovative research and the compilation of range of data on China, India, central Asia, Japan, Siberia, south-east Asia that are seldom collated and analyzed together, McKeown demonstrates that Asian migration from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries was comparable in volume to the trans-oceanic migrations from Europe. The term “global” as the theme of McKeown's essay, used as an adjective, evocatively captures the migration patterns and circulations of the modern world. But the concept of global is also the definition of the process underlying the modern economic and political system that through its very logic of reproduction creates unequal and uneven terrains. My comments explore some aspects of this unequal terrain.

An insistence on the broad similarities and structural linkages of migrations across the globe since the 1840s is important because it can clear the ground for more effective comparisons. Only after questioning the a priori distinction that privileges “modern” transatlantic migrations as categorically distinct from those in the rest of the world can we begin to understand each migrant and migrant flow as emerging from a distinct nexus of global, regional, local, and historical processes. I think I am in agreement with all of the participants in this forum on this basic point. Rather than quibble over numbers and definitions, all of the contributions have attempted to refine our historical comparisons and question some of the interpretive frameworks that are rooted in depictions of the Atlantic migrations as a norm. Once this global foundation is established, we can engage in the detailed empirical and conceptual work that will better address the sticky problems of numbers and categories. Who and what is actually being counted and not counted? When and why should we distinguish between long and short distance, or between international and domestic migration? How should we deal with return and repeat migrations? What is revealed or obscured by taking individuals, families or more extended networks as the basic units of migration? What is the practical or discursive significance of “free” migration?